Improving Customer Service with UC

By Mac McCarver

The three ‘C’s of customer service are convenience, collaboration, and communication. Unified Communications (UC), by merging business communications from many sources into one platform, elevates and bolsters each ‘C’. By adopting UC or learning to more effectively use its robust functionality, your business can stand out and leave the competition in the dust in terms of improving customer service.

Unified Convenience

UC might as well stand for Unified Convenience. Streamlining and automating processes is the core logic behind its purpose, and this extends to creating a platform that allows customers to communicate on their own terms, in their own ways.

This is essential to improving customer service. A UC system allows a customer to interact with a business the way they find most useful. For example, a customer may just need to make a payment, submit a change of information, or some other routine task. With UC, that can be accomplished easily with a call greeted by an IVR that can facilitate their requests with realistic voice prompts. A process that would have involved waiting for an agent who would then ask a routine series of questions and taken some time is now taken care of in minutes without waiting or needing to speak to anyone. Alternatively, they can receive more personal help with an instant message connected to a ‘Chat’ button on the company website.

After-hours, customers can have their voicemail, email, or other message collected by the business UC system into a single inbox for an agent to more quickly respond to.

With UC, convenience also extends to the users employed by the business. Improving customer service is assisted by robust mobility features that allow staff to engage or inform customers from home or abroad. If a salesperson wakes up feeling sick, they can easily change their voicemail message to inform a prospective customer that they will be called back as soon as possible; alternatively, they can effortlessly have their calls forwarded to a trusted manager or sales partner to ensure their customer is completely satisfied. Or if they need to work from home, their business extension and the full power of their UC system is accessible on their smartphone and laptop, and features like Find Me, Follow Me make call rule programming simple.

Unified Collaboration

In addition to convenience, improving customer service with UC is facilitated by its robust collaboration tools. This is especially important in a global economy where businesses and customers may be interacting across vast geographical distances. Many organizations require a more interactive form of communication than simple phone calls and messages can provide.

With UC, powerful conferencing tools are at the fingertips of every company representative. At a moment’s notice, an agent can be speaking face-to-face with a prospective customer via a web-based meeting. This combines audio, video, and file collaboration tools in one easy-to-use platform. Moving more meetings and collaborations online saves travel and logistic time, as well as a considerable amount of money via less travel expense and the flexibility to accept more remote customers.

Additionally, the role of users in improving customer service is bolstered by their being able to effectively collaborate using the same tools, as well as intuitive status and presence information and internal text and video chat features.

Unified Communication

Moving to UC is essential to improving customer service in today’s world, especially for a growing business. Having audio and video calls, emails, chats, voicemails, and so much more easily managed from a single platform engineered to ease communication elevates the ability of users to more effectively satisfy customer needs. Improving customer service is vital to business. Customers are willing to pay more and more likely to recommend your business to friends if they feel like they had a good experience. No business can afford to miss a single opportunity, and UC allows users to handle and generate more opportunities by making customer contact frictionless and easy.

Learn more about growing your business by improving customer service with UC by watching this short UC Tech Chat on the subject below!

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About the Author

Mac McCarver

Mac McCarver is the Content Creation Manager at Digium. His chief responsibility in this role is the creation of engaging content for distribution on all of Digium’s platforms. He graduated with honors from the University of North Alabama with a BA in English Literature. For his efforts, he was selected for membership in Sigma Tau Delta, the international honor society for distinguished achievement in English language, literature, and writing.